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About this project

We created a way to involve and educate children while cooking at home. Regular measuring cups are confusing and difficult to understand for young children. The cups all look the same, there's no way to distinguish them from each other. The KidCup utilizes a pie chart like form to teach children the difference between each fraction.

1. Children tend to not eat healthy. Cooking at home leads to healthier food choices.

2. Children learn from example. Involving children in the cooking process educates them on how to cook and make healthy food choices.

3. If you cook with your children, you instill healthy eating habits and standards that will stay with them as they grow.

Involving children in the food-making process will establish healthier eating habits in them and lead to an overall healthier life.

We looked at the cooking process and identified meal preparation as an area where children, ages 3 to 6, can be most involved. By engaging children during prep time, they learn the necessary skills to prepare a meal and feel a sense of ownership of the food they cooked.

We also looked at food-prep tools available to children and found traditional measuring cups notably lacking. For an adult, measuring cups are simple and straightforward. Explaining incremental measurements to a child, however, can prove difficult. The overall design of the measuring cup has remained unchanged and its form offers no clear relationship between fractional quantities.

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” -Confucius

Educators have known for decades the value of a hands-on approach to learning. The late 1800s introduced the invention of “manipulatives”— maneuverable objects designed for teaching mathematical concepts. Since the early 1900s, the use of manipulatives has been essential in educating children mathematical concepts.

Studies show "Students who have appropriate manipulatives to help them learn fractions outperform students who rely only on textbooks when tested on these concepts." (Jordan, Miller, and Mercer, 1998; Sebesta and Martin, 2004)

All of the design concepts we came up with were either too complicated or not feasible. A lot of rotating edges or collapsible systems that made sense, but were not ideal ways of redesigning a measuring cup for children.

Our first prototype, 3D printed and spray painted

Our recipe book includes healthy kid friendly recipes to use with your KidCup.

Hurry to be one of ten to submit your own recipe to be featured in our recipe book! We will feature your recipe along with your name as credit for all the other backers to see!

The first 50 backers will receive our early bird special!!

The KidCup is 100% American made and will be injection molded out of food safe polypropylene. We have an injection molding company standing by to produce the KidCup once our campaign is over.

why we need your help...

Because the KidCup is injection molded, we need you as backers to help us fund this process. The tooling needed to injection mold the KidCup is very expensive, and involves a high start up cost on our end.

Bryan Zoleta

Emily Michka

Both Industrial Designers from Chicago, we first designed the KidCup for a school project at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

We worked with numerous professors from the University of Illinois at Chicago to help solidify the design for the KidCup.

We would like to thank all of those who helped out in the making of KidCup.